Character Warping for Smooth Transition of Game Characters

In the modern game industry, graphic contents are those of the most eye-catching elements of the players. However, the price of producing high quality graphic contents to satisfy players eyes is rapidly increasing. In this paper, we propose a smooth character transition technique between sprite images using image warping technique to reduce the production cost of the graphic contents by automatically generating frames constituting the animation. There have been technologies that animates a character by moving an image using a vector image like Live2D. However, they need to rework the graphics content after it has been created and then redraw the parts to separate them. On the other hand, our method can obtain the result without additional work if only start and end points of the animation and a sufficient number of control points are given. The proposed method sets control points corresponding to each image and creates triangles based on them. Then, affine transformation is performed between the corresponding triangle between the start image and the end image. The obtained triangles are synthesized to create successive frames to produce the smooth animation. The proposed technique significantly reduces the burden of producing graphic content for animation.